The Tradwife Rises with Sarah Archer

Sarah Archer came by to make an episode from scratch. What's the real history of the American housewife? Where did the tradwife come from, and why? Is she okay? Will we be okay? And who is she churning all that butter for? 

Sarah Archer's accompanying Substack post https://open.substack.com/pub/saraharcher/p/going-to-business

Sarah Archer's bibliography

Clips:

Mrs. Modern versus Mrs. Drudge from The Middleton Family at the 1939 New York World's Fair (produced by Westinghouse) https://youtu.be/vH2Lpl-UB64?si=vtVFAWhAvkDq-EOE

Design for Dreaming from General Motors 1956 Motorama featuring the Frigidaire “Kitchen of the Future” display https://youtu.be/4_ccAf82RQ8?si=mzVREYgY-d2yWcCl

“Total Electric Home,” Westinghouse, 1959 https://youtu.be/IRrMLaiiAGY?si=aoc-7PQfSQIEZW5r

The Frankfurt Kitchen at MoMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T3EM872x-A

Articles Books and Pods:

Dolores Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262580557/the-grand-domestic-revolution/

Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674286078

“Wife Sentences,” Moira Donegan https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/lisa-selin-davis-s-confused-history-of-homemakers-25336

“Trad Wives,” In Bed with the Right https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-bed-with-the-right/id1696774612?i=1000651855063

Support You're Wrong About:

Bonus Episodes on Patreon
Buy cute merch

Where else to find us:

Sarah's other show: You Are Good
[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show: Maintenance Phase

Links:

https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com

Transcript

Sarah Marshall: When I was a kid, I thought everybody's dad was constantly getting melanomas cut off.

Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about The Tradwife with Sarah Archer. Sarah Archer is our home economics correspondent. We had her on a while ago to talk about Martha Stewart, her rise and fall, and her rise again. And I loved making that episode, and I loved making this episode, too.

Today we are talking about the tradwife, that social media figure, sometimes with a nice frilly dress, sometimes doing aesthetic barnyard chores, maybe sewing by candlelight, talking about how much better it is to take care of a husband and children than to be hustling for a paycheck. 

This is a tradwife that I know from recent social media and of course, she is just another chapter in a story that's been going on for many centuries. If you haven't heard of her, you have heard of her ancestors, and I hope you're as ready to dig in as I was today. 

That's about it as far as this episode goes. If you like this one, if you like what we do generally, we have bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple+, including currently our saga about Britney Spears. We're talking about her memoir with Eve Lindley, and our concluding section, Chapter Four, will be out very soon, and we cannot wait to share it with you.  

Let's go talk about some Tradwives. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. Here's your episode.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, where with me today is the very woman with whom I was supposed to spend a weekend in Cleveland at the Adult Figure Skating Championships before we both got too busy.

Sara A: Alas! 

Sarah M: Alas, but next year. 

Sara A: I know, next year. 

Sarah M: But with me today is Sarah Archer, and you're talking about I think the topic that most fascinates me in the world right now. So it's going to be a good one. 

Sara A: It's pretty darn fascinating. And it seems to be enjoying a surge of interest. 

Sarah M: So our episode today, and you asked me how I was right before we started recording, and my answer is that this morning I drank some of the last of the G Fuel that I bought in 2020, which is an energy drink formulated especially for gamers, and I feel like I'm about to have a panic attack, which is the perfect state of mind in which to do an episode that I am calling, The Trad Wife Rises.

Sara A: Yes. 

Sarah M: We're talking about the trad wife, we're talking about why I can't go on social media and start looking at gardening or housekeeping or cleaning type videos without the algorithm inching toward white supremacy. And so how do we get from here to the scrub daddy? 

Sara A: I can tell you when I first discovered tradwives, which was only a few years ago, I was late to the party on it. Which is strange because it was just a few years after I was researching the mid-century kitchen. So I had been steeped in ephemera and print ads and industrial shorts and commercials about how this or that appliance will make you more sexually attractive to your husband or what have you. All the usual claims. And I read a post on Medium by Maya Kosoff, that was about her sort of trad wife rabbit hole. It turns out a college classmate of hers is Kelly Havens of Open Flame long hair fame. 

Sarah M: Yes. Kelly Havens is a fixture on a subreddit called, I think, Fundie Snark. 

Sarah A: You follow her, right? Or you pop in now and then?

Sarah M: I used to, yeah. I remember we talked about this a couple years ago, because I think that some of the best cultural criticism being written today and discussions of politics and feminism and gender in America is being done by ex-evangelicals, a lot of the time. Because the sort of the view inside the machine is so fascinating. 

Kelly Havens was so fascinating to me as sort of someone who you just encounter on a subreddit about so many different people making beautiful aesthetic images about submitting to the patriarchy. Because she was doing it in a way that I as a girl who would envied the Kirsten doll for being able to wear a crown of open flames for Saint Lucia's Day or whatever. She's living the Anne of Green Gables life. 

Sarah A: Absolutely. 

Sarah M: And that was maybe when I started thinking about it was this, we're all in our own different algorithms, but I think the last few years there's been so much about ‘cottage core’ and the aesthetic. There's this Tumblr post I think about once a day that’s like, “let's stop glamorizing hustle culture,  let's start glamorizing being a little mouse who has nothing to do all day, but collect dew drops and slice a strawberry like a giant ham”. 

And that's, I think, this weird point of intersection whereby wanting to live a simpler life where you aren't being bombarded by screens all day. You can end up in the let me live so simply that I go back to before I had rights or what I imagined that time was like kind of a thing. 

This topic crops up in so many areas, but my kind of question and baggage for the trad wife, I think, is that the trad wife has emerged in the past few years it feels like. For people who don't know, we're going to start with a taxonomy of who or what is the trad wife and why is she rising? But to me, it feels like this insidious point of potential radicalization to live in a social media world where we are able to present so many aesthetic images of home making and wellness that sort of promise it as the answer. And yet it feels like a piece of bait being put under a box trap that's gonna get ‘ya. 

And my question is, how do we get what we want from this? We know we see something we want in there, so how do we get the good part? 

Sara A: And what is it that we want? In looking at the aesthetics, this is the time period during which cores have come into full flower. 

Sarah M: Right. We used to have only a couple of cores and now we have thousands.

Sarah A: And the pandemic definitely, all the cliches are true that the pandemic basically, while we were all being driven mad, people were experimenting with baking and gardening and doing things from scratch and sourdough. I managed to actually kill our sourdough starter finally, but for a while we had a good, robust starter.

Sarah M: That's fantastic. 

Sarah A: We also had this feeling of not wanting to throw anything away and being nervous about groceries, which I think felt very vintage. It was this very kind of Depression-era, we're saving every scrap because you never know. 

I also started to notice that there was this kind of, to paraphrase the title of an old Caitlin Flanagan article, sort of to hell with all that BS hustle culture and a renewed desire to embrace rest as a tool of resistance. And to not be exhausted and not be exploited, and the scales were falling from people's eyes vis a vis hustle culture. 

And it was also a terrible time in media. So I think people like you and me and all our friends who write, people were being laid off left and right. I would start writing for a new publication and find out the person was gone, and it was just this bloodbath of several years. And so I think because that was happening in the media sphere, it rattled a group of people that are not accustomed to being rattled in that way.  

The thing that distinguishes kitchen design and kitchen aspiration and sort of kitchen reverie in the middle decades of the 20th century, really starting in around World War I, is that it's all framed around the splendors of the future. Sort of looking at the historicism that certain tradwives will do a throwback to what they perceive as Victorian, or mid-century, and the mid-century sort of tradwife kind of pin-up style. 

One of the genres of the tradwife milieu is deliberately retro. The futuristic designs of that era were coupled with a very retrograde gender politic. This is the kitchen of tomorrow, it's going to rocket you into space. And rocketing you into space actually means helping you save time so you can do more volunteer work or take up tennis. It doesn't mean be on the Supreme Court. It means continue being at home.

Sarah M: It's such an interesting moment for gender politics, too, it seems to me. Because we have World War II as a driver of so many technological advances that are motivated by war, but then end up in the household. And we have women leaving the home in order to work, famously. And then somewhat less famously being told, all right, it's now your patriotic duty to go back home and let your husbands have your jobs. You can't have them anymore. 

And so this weird moment of, we have come so far technologically, and women have stepped so far out of the household, not that women weren't working before, that this was to say we're keeping the technology and we're losing the gender politics that we've gained.

Sara A: Do you want to do a little bit backward in time review of kitchen design and politics? 

Sarah M: All I think about is kitchen design, because that's what I have to deal with every day. 

Sarah A: Every single day, the work triangle. One of the things that kind of blew my mind when I was researching this initially is that a standalone kitchen as a room with all your kitchen-ly things in it, as we know it, as a design forward nice place to be and do what you need to do in there.

Sarah M: Where people end up at the party. 

Sarah A: Exactly. It's a very new idea. It emerges in the early 1920s at the earliest, but it doesn't really come into sort of full flower until after the war. Because before that, for the most part, you either had people who had household stuff, and their kitchen probably looked like maybe a modest version of the kitchen on Downton Abbey.

Sarah M: Emily Gilmore's. 

Sarah A: Exactly. You have the basement workspace, right? And it's the broom closet. It's a workspace in the household. Or you're on a farm, in a tenement, in a flat, and there's maybe two rooms, and one of those rooms has a stove, and that's it. 

So there isn't a kitchen per se, which is actually one of the reasons why a lot of New York City apartments have such odd configurations of showers and toilets and kitchenettes and things that don't really seem like somebody purpose built it to begin with, because they didn't.

Sarah M: When I was 13, it was my dream to someday be like a New York City downtown artist living in an apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. I just felt that if you have a bathtub in your kitchen, you are an artist. 

Sara A: You're on your way, for sure. Important people are coming to your gallery opening.

Sarah M: To not buy your art. 

Sara A: Exactly. To admire, but not buy your art. And the way in which modern kitchen design came about was actually an outgrowth of home economics. 

Sarah M: And please tell us about the story of home economics, because I feel like that term does not mean what it used to. 

Sara A: So home economics used to be called domestic science, and it was a very serious undertaking for the sort of small handful of women like Ellen Swallow Richards, who got a PhD in chemistry, I believe, in the 19th century and was very concerned with things like hygiene and maintaining a healthy home. There's a huge emphasis in the Victorian era on cleanliness, partially as a response to immigration, and this perception - real or ginned up - that cities are dirty and milk sterilization is really important. And of course it will come up later when we talk about trad wives, right?

Sarah M: Weirdly, one of the most pressing issues of our time, despite Louis Pasteur having lived and died for our sins. Anyway.

Sara A: Exactly. I know you'd think that people would stick with this, but yeah. So there's a woman named Christine Frederick who studies scientific management. And scientific management is sometimes referred to as Taylorism, because it was devised by this guy, Frederick Winslow Taylor. No relation to Christine Frederick. And he worked for these big companies like Bethlehem Steel and different places. And he would look at how many steps from here to there, where are the supplies vis a vis, the tools vis a vis, the machinery and factories, and say, how can you save steps? How can you save time? How can you save money? 

Sarah M: I have a question. Is this the dad from Cheaper by the Dozen?

Sarah A: It's connected to the dad. The mom and the dad from Cheaper by the Dozen studied Taylorism and used Taylorism, like Christine Frederick, to try to apply the lessons of the factory floor to the home. Because the home is a factory that makes little Americans, right? 

It's important to also mention Margaret Schütte-Lihotzky, who I'm probably not pronouncing right because I'm not a native German speaker. But she was one of the first women architects to qualify in Austria. She designed the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926. And designed a sort of U-shaped kitchen with wiped clean surfaces that were very hygienic, and it was colorful, and there were lots of little drawers and places to store your rice and your flour. 

And her idea was, despite being an architect herself, she believed that housework was a profession that deserved a proper setting and the right tools for the job. So you have on the one hand, this very forward-thinking design. The Frankfurt Kitchen is fabulous. You'd be delighted to have a Frankfurt Kitchen now. And there's this kind of idea that this is where women belong. We're going to advance the technology and advance the design, but it hadn't occurred to anyone that there might be people who don't want to do this full time. There might be women or wives or moms who don't want to do this full time. 

So the kitchen design of that era became a kind of vehicle for class mobility. Because it hadn't occurred to anybody that it would be, get your man to wash all your dishes. It was more like, you're an up-and-coming person, maybe you're working at a department store, you have money, you're newlyweds, you want to entertain because you're climbing up the social ladder and you have appliances. 

And sometimes they would use phrases, like Westinghouse famously has this beautiful ad from the 20s where a group of ladies are sitting around having tea and they're wearing these gorgeous, bohemian clothes and it says, “I have an invisible servant, and the invisible servant is the stove.” The appliances are appealing to consumers who probably never had household staff, but it's enabling them to become a new kind of person. So it's not so much in that early period, I have an invisible servant and now I can go beyond the Supreme Court. It's more like, I can be a stay at home lady of the house rather than a housewife.

Sarah M: Technology is always about what we dare to imagine. So it's like you can imagine having an invisible servant, but not a husband who helps you. 

Sarah A: Exactly. 

Sarah M: Which I imagine is why my kitchen was built in, I think, 1949. And I love it. But the counters are much too short for me, as you would imagine. I'm like, 6’2”. 

Sarah A: I would imagine.

Sarah M: It's a constant struggle. And it's very small. And it's a small house. But I also wonder if kitchens were built like that for so long based on the understanding of, no one will help you and no one can hear you scream. 

Sara A: Oh, yeah. What happens in the postwar era is now there's a big emphasis on anti-communism.

Sarah M: Of course. 

Sarah A: But what's super interesting is that the fifties is an era when there's a strong connection between the aesthetic of office work and all these different spaces. So if you look at the kitchen of the future and the kitchen of tomorrow, the miracle kitchen has a command center. So you would see women sitting at a desk and going through their recipes. And there were filing drawers and the telephone and sort of the whole… 

Sarah M: It feels like they're trying to legitimize housework by making it look more like office work. And it's like, no, housework is the real work, your thing is made up. 

Sara A: Your thing is invented. But it was appealing to a desire. 

Sarah M: Yeah. 

Sara A: And it had the effect of making it seem, again, like now you're a professional. Because keep in mind, in the late fifties there are people around who remember shoveling coal into a stove, right? There are people who remember when the kitchen made you physically dirty because of the kind of work you were doing in America, because that's still true in other parts of the world.  

Because if you remember not having running water, not having electricity, not having gas. Every time somebody wants to take a shower or a bath you have to shovel coal. Laundry is like an all-day project, so it really was like a full-time job. You could not live without doing all of this work pretty much all day long, even if you had help. So the idea that you can keep food warm and put a wash in and turn the TV on to entertain the kids, suddenly you have all of these techniques to help you be your most fabulous self at home. 

I have to give a shout out to the scholar Dolores Hayden, who is not a household name in the way that I personally insist that she would be. She wrote a book in 1981 called, The Grand Domestic Revolution, that's all about the early social reformers. One of whom was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, advocating for things like collective childcare and group housecleaning, and sort of women helping each other with all of their household necessities. And they critiqued architecture by saying essentially, the single-family home cuts women off from all the shared resources of being able to have playgroups. This is over a hundred years ago. 

Sarah M: And boy, did nobody listen.

Sarah A: No, boy, did nobody listen! Man! And that's the other thing. I think it's not an accident that the trad wife landscape is largely that, because essentially all of the selling Mrs. Consumer was designed for the white middle-class woman, right? It's not people at the very top, because they don't give a shit. It's not people at the very bottom, because they can't afford it. But the people in the middle, especially the lower half of the middle, who want to be in the upper half of the middle. Ooh, new appliances, new decor, better neighborhood, lawn.

Sarah M: And not to jump ahead too much, but I feel like that is, and this is not an original thought of mine. I've watched some great commentators talking about, especially the restock aesthetic where you watch people restock their refrigerators, the cleantok thing, where you're using so many products. Watching influencers getting a Stanley Cup to go with every outfit they have. 

I love Stanley Cups. I have three of them. I think they're great. I do not drink enough water. It's one of the only ways to get me to do it. And I like feeling like a Utah mom, so we all like stuff to one extent or another, and none of us are invulnerable to this. But showing influencers going to Target and buying new bedding every month or something like that, and this kind of spiral of overconsumption that we've created, feels intrinsically related to the best possible demographic to market these aspirational trappings of what we are saying, financial stability and bounty is, people who feel like they're almost there. 

And I feel like so many people… and I'm not saying I have a valid alternative for them, but so many people get into content creation and figure out they're good at it and get some brand deals and do some videos that do numbers of them like cleaning grapes or whatever. And then they have the ability to buy, or to at least buy and return, or to be sent as a gift by a brand they're working with all of this stuff. And whether you're paying for it or not, I think there is a basic American hunger that we are taught from birth to get the most stuff. Because if you have the most stuff, then you won't die.

Sara A: And that's consumer engineering. And the quote, my favorite, is “Goods fall into two classes: those that we use, such as motor cars or safety razors, and those that we use up, such as toothpaste or soda biscuits. Consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods that we now merely use. Wearing things out does not produce prosperity. Buying things does.”

Sarah M: No!

Sarah A: I know. It's like this is really seeing the guy with the knife come into the house. 

Sarah M: Yes, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I can't go back. I don't know how it works. 

Sara A: Exactly. He's not trying to get you to buy stuff, it's fine. You'll notice that one of the ways that you can date a house, especially if you follow real estate porn accounts, as we all do, is by the colors of the appliances. 

Sarah M: Yeah. 

Sara A: And this was actually something that of all people, Alfred P. Sloan of foundation fame. So Alfred P. Sloan was the CEO of General Motors. And the thing that he's most known for other than ‘brought to you by’ is the advent of annual styling, which was to use different colors. Because Henry Ford famously didn't do this. So it was like, now you can get this car in emerald green, and next year you can get it in burgundy.

Sarah M: Oh, so he invented Stanley's, really.

Sara A: Exactly. Exactly. And then appliances started doing it. Because again, there's this connection, GM, Frigidaire, that appliances can start to look dated. So if it's pink or blue, then it's 1970, you're wanting harvest gold. 

Sarah M: God damn you, man. We could have done without that.

Sarah A: Yeah, and it works. 

Sarah M: It works so well. 

Sara A: And to this day, we're caught in a cycle where the only thing you can do is just continually buy white enamel so it looks like it hasn't changed since 1920. 

Sarah M: Sarah, I am so sick of it. And I went to an estate sale recently at a house in southwest Portland that had original appliances from probably 1962, and I could have wept. 

Sarah A: And they probably work. 

Sarah M: Yes, I'm sure they did. Because the person who lived there had, I think, been using that kitchen until the day they died pretty recently. And the number of beautiful appliances that were made in a time when I think they would have worked for much longer than what we're building now have been ripped out.

Sarah A: Yep. Yeah, it's horrific. 

Sarah M: I can't handle it. All the goldenrods, the avocados, the harvest orange.

Sara A: The avocados, the harvest gold. I know, the burnt sienna, but yeah.

Sarah M: It's the burnt sienna. It's fine. But I think it's crucial to just know that this habit that we have isn't an accident. And people just didn't have as much stuff. We have a storage industry now. And a hundred years ago, we didn't.

Sarah M: One of the grand tricks is to get consumers trapped in a phase where we are so busy acquiring and shedding stuff at the whim of the marketplace, that we never get to develop a taste of our own. 

Sarah A: That's absolutely true. 

Sarah M: That's a bummer.

Sara A: No, definitely. There are so many examples in print ads from the 1930s all the way, probably through the 90s and even probably after that, about how you look and how not bedraggled you'll be for your husband if you're-

Sarah M: Oh my God.

Sarah A: It's just so gross. There's one that's like a woman who's very busty and the headline is like, ‘stacked’, and it's stacked with technology and there's a man staring at her. It's just, it's so gross. So it's like the consumer, in a way, is the man. Because he's probably ultimately paying for the dishwasher. 

Sarah M: Because he gets to have a better woman. Because he throws in a dishwasher and now you have no excuse to not look great. Because God forbid you use your extra time to read a book.

Sarah A: Never. Never. 

Sarah M: Or even to just do nothing, right? That's my political plank. Women being allowed to do nothing, to just fritter away an afternoon. 

Sara A: And it's not an accident that we feel that way when the modern kitchen was designed around principles that modernized factories, right? This obsession that Americans have with always getting things done and being productive, it doesn't come from nowhere. Even if we're consciously.

Sarah M: Yeah, we didn't invent hustle culture!

Sarah A: Did you listen to the episode of, In Bed with the Right?

Sarah M: No.

Sarah A: So In Bed With the Right, which is a wonderful podcast hosted by Adrian Daub and the great Moira Donegan, who writes for the Guardian and a number of other places.

Sarah M: One of the best writers of our time, I think. 

Sara A: Oh my God. Yeah. Like incredible. And she wrote a really interesting review of a new book about housewives for book forum that's called Wife Sentences, which I highly recommend. 

So essentially, Moira has a grand unified theory of trad wifedom, which I think is brilliant. And part of it is that in the era of sort of Obama, plus or minus five years, the aughts and teens. 

Sarah M: The long Obama administration. 

Sarah A: The long Obama administration was the sort of the rise of what we could be termed the ‘girl boss’. And she mentions Nasty Gal and Audrey Gellman and The Wing.

Sarah M: I remember the first time I saw the word ‘girl boss’, like the first time it entered my brain and it was when I saw-

Sarah A: It's not my favorite. 

Sarah M: Yeah, no, it's run its course like a bad fever. But that moment was in 2016. And it's amazing that the girl boss era was so short in the end.

Sara A: It was. But what Moira is arguing is that the Tradwife movement is a response to girlboss-dom, and here's why. Because, essentially, capitalism. There was a phase when everybody was celebrating hustle culture, it was cool, and you could be counterculture, and it was… 

Sarah M: Oh, I was one of them. I was 24, so I was the right age to be duped by that, yeah. 

Sara A: Hustle hard. Everybody was hustling, and there were billionaire biographies. And everybody has soured on that, very understandably. And that as a result of that, feminism in the era of Hillary Clinton, the ultimate quote unquote ‘girl boss’, got lumped in. Those two things got connected in people's minds. 

Feminism means hyper capitalism or late capitalism, as the kids call it. And that as a result of that, there's a kind of far-left man that hates both of those things. And the trad wife is perfectly calibrated to appeal to him. So it's somebody who hates neoliberalism and hates hustle culture and feels put upon, and likes the idea of a woman accepting an assigned role. And then the irony, of course, is that the ones who are really good at it make money. But you can't see it, and they don't talk about it. 

Sarah M: And this is, I feel like, where we get into Act Two. Because you and I started talking about this. We have been in a general way for a long time, because I love to talk about kitchen design with you, and home economics, and- 

Sara A: Stepford Wives.

Sarah M: Yeah. Stepford Wives. This whole area. But we both, as did the rest of America as far as I can tell, became utterly bewitched by Nara Smith and her performative cheerio making. 

Sarah A: Oh, yeah, absolutely. 

Sarah M: Can you tell us about that? 

Sarah A: So I, for the life of me, I'm not totally sure. I think you mentioned the idea that some of this could be fetish content. And I feel ill equipped to come down on one side or the other of this. I feel like it might be totally sincere. It might be tongue in cheek. It may be some combination of all the above. 

Sarah M: You know, I think that everything is everything on the internet, and there are some creators who are doing kind of trad wife parody in such an arch way that still some people think is sincere. 

Like Nara Smith deserves her own description, because by the time this episode comes out, this will have completely run its course. But there was a moment when everybody realized at the same time that what Nara Smith was doing was very funny, right? And I still don't know what her perspective is or where she's making these videos from. But art is more than intent. But the basic template for a Nara Smith video is something like, “This morning my toddler came into my bedroom asking for hot chocolate, and so I took some cacao fruit and fermented the beans and made chocolate in about four to six weeks.” And she has a lovely voice and so it's this very pleasing sort of whispery.

Sarah A: It's hypnotic. 

Sarah M: Yeah, very, a little bit Stepford-y. People have mentioned that a lot to description of this sort of almost like a poetic form, where your small child asks for a snack and… 

Sarah A: That's your prompt.

Sarah M: And you invent the wheel to make something from scratch that takes hours to days. And it's such a great way to drive engagement. Because of course, people are going to be like, your baby is starving. But it's delightful to watch if you're for it. And it's delightfully crazy-making to watch if you're confused about where this is going. No one cannot watch it. 

Sara A: It's a perfect illustration of the aphorism that I stumbled into when I first started freelancing, which is that money is time. When you're in charge of your own time, you start to become acutely aware of, do I actually want to have this meeting? Does this make sense? Is this just like, meh? 

Sarah M: Could this be handled in an email? 

Sarah A: Yeah. Or just ignore it. How about we ignore it? That's also fun. And what I think is so fascinating about looking at somebody like Nara Smith is that it's almost as though she's taken rejecting technology or using technology like Instagram when it suits, which is every day.

Sarah M: Yes. You can use technology as long as it's not in the picture, as long as it's only taking the picture. 

Sarah A: It's invisible. 

Sarah M: The invisible servant. 

Sara A: Yeah. And this is a super interesting connection to high end kitchens nowadays, which are in companies like Plain English Kitchens, which do top of the line, gorgeous, kitchen installations. You don't see a blinking clock or a flashing light anywhere. It's wood. It's painted. It's Farrow and Ball colors. It's brass. It's marble. It looks like 1910 and you have help. That's what the kitchen looks like. It doesn't look high tech at all. 

So there's something going on in the trad wife universe that is deliberately low tech in a way that seems theatrically homespun, right? And we're taking the long way to do everything that feels like a financial flex. Because if you have time to do that stuff, then you're better off than most of us. 

Sarah M: And Ballerina Farm. Again, for people who have actual children to bother spending time with, as opposed to watching videos of other people's online, like I do.

Sarah A: Cats.

Sarah M: Cats. But this was like, this is an interesting moment in the last few months where the, I assume they're Mormons, if they're not, they're Mormon coded. But this couple that has a farm in Utah, they have 35,000 kids, and they got a following for the mom posting videos of making homemade mozzarella and making homemade grilled cheese. This is very Nara Smith.

Sara A: Well, Moira on In Bed With the Right said that it's the JetBlue fortune, right? That the husband is a JetBlue heir? 

Sarah M: Yeah. And that was what people were shocked by. There was this moment when people realized, oh, these humble homespun Mormons are JetBlue heirs. Which like, by the way, that's the funniest airline to be an heir for.

Sarah A: I'm an Uber heiress.

Sarah M: It's what mother would call ‘new money’. 

Sarah A: Boy, is it! Oh, man. 

Sarah M: I don't know. And this is a moment too, when you realize the average age of the people in the comment section, which could be 12, where people are like, wait a minute, you're in this rustic farmhouse making mozzarella, you're pretending to not be millionaires. Only a millionaire who has eight children could possibly have the time to be making mozzarella for a couple of hours in the middle of the day with all of your kids unoccupied because you're probably homeschooling them. 

Sarah A: Has time. What runs through a lot of this because I knew you brought up white supremacy earlier, and I think that it's important to touch on like that and essential oils and like a number of other things, QAnon.

Sarah M: Yeah, 20 years ago, those first two things wouldn't have gone together so easily. But now we all know. 

Sara A: It's a strange world. They're opting out of consumer culture. So they're opting out of the very thing that created the model housewife in the first place. 

Sarah M: Mrs. Modern thinks she can live without her dishwasher, but she can't.

Sara A: But I think that part of what we're seeing with people, and I do not mean to impugn Ballerina Farm. I do not know Ballerina Farm personally, but the homeschooling, homesteading, homemade-ness of all of this is symbolically, and literally probably, opting out of public goods, public life, shared civic experiences like public schools, grocery stores. 

What is so interesting about the sort of second wave feminist embrace of, there's a wonderful print ad that's like a women's lib rally in favor of dishwashers. So they're like, no more grief! It's all these women dressed like Rhoda cheering for them. Because having those tools made it easier, not easy, but easier for women to do more things to participate more in public life. 

Sarah M: In the past, it feels like women had been kept home long enough to realize that it might be nice to be able to leave. 

Sara A: Right?  This is like what I was saying when we were talking on the phone. I was saying, what is it like, vaccines, feminism and NATO have all been around too long, because people are taking them for granted. And that's how we got into this mess. 

So women who are growing up now who are, let's say, in their 20s are not really in memory distance of things like women can't have their own credit cards. You know what I mean? Whereas I'm 46, so I don't remember it, but my mom sure did because she lived it. She was out of college and working before Roe.

Sarah M: My mom was a college student when women weren't allowed to run marathons because they thought that your uterus would fall out. 

Sara A: We're not that far from that in time. 

Sarah M: Yeah. We give boomers a lot of shit, very fairly. However, they are also a link to the past, as I've been thinking lately. And when I look at my relationship with my mom, there are so many paradigm shifts in terms of how culture is now versus how she grew up in it that is hard for her to grasp. But it's also hard for me to grasp the world as she used to know it. Oh, I know. Being one generation away from somebody who had a mother who essentially couldn't leave a marriage. Yeah, these freedoms are very easy to forget. 

Sara A: Easy to forget and also easy to not see. Because they're just part of the fact that you can vote, the fact that you can own property, the fact that you could start your own business and have your own line of credit. All of that stuff is a hundred years ago, none of it, right? Or a hundred and ten years ago. If you grow up with that embedded and then you hear about the evils of feminism, you might think, oh yeah, feminism is terrible because I can do everything I want as a woman. Yeah that's for a reason. 

Sarah M: And getting to sort of the central question of act two, I feel like the seductive idea that you see people expressing on social media - either in a playful way or very seriously - is I don't want to work, I want to stay home. I want to be a stay-at-home girlfriend. I want to be a stay-at-home wife. I want to be a housewife. I want to have the freedom to take care of my children while a man pays the bills.  

And obviously, there are so many counter arguments to that, which we are about to make. But I also feel like, yes, you shouldn't have to work. People should not have to work as hard as they're working. It feels like we're saying, I don't want to submit to capitalism, I just want to submit to a man. We need to figure out how to not submit to anybody, somehow. But I unfortunately do not have the great economic mind that could sort that out for us. 

My thoughts on this, not exactly debate, I'm paraphrasing, but by Lisa Ann Walter, who played Chessie in The Parent Trap, everyone's favorite character. And I just remember reading a quote from her about family and career, “neither works without the other”. It was that simple. And there's a lot more to it. And the execution is extremely difficult, but if I have kids, I want to, I think, take care of them a significant amount of time. Not all of the time, I would lose my mind. We were not meant to be forced to be around our children without any breaks, I don't think. That seems nuts. Humans have evolved to have extended families. 

Sarah A: Also very true. 

Sarah M: And communities. If I have kids, which I don't know if I will, I know that if I committed to that, then that would be something that I would want to truly commit to and put my time and energy into and not do halfway. But I love what I do, and I wouldn't want to give it up either. And I think this idea that work has to happen in the shape that men and capital invented in the Industrial Revolution, that feels like one of the big problems here.

Sarah A: Yeah. It's bullshit. 

Sarah M: Because you and I both love what we do, and we also love to waste an afternoon. 

Sarah A: We do!

Sarah M: Yeah. And that's the interesting thing, is like, does the trad wife exist when there isn't a camera pointed at her? Because if you are making cereal from scratch for your toddler, your toddler doesn't care. They probably just want the store-bought kind that's more familiar to them and more consistent texturally. 

Sarah A: They want Froot Loops, as promised. But yeah, that's the thing. I think it gets back a little bit to what we talked about in our Martha episode. That it's because the content is domesticity, domestic life, that can lead you to think that this is a reflection of how a person is living. But it's really how a person is producing content. This is entertainment. I think your point about when the cameras are off, how trad are they? They might be ordering Dominos when the cameras are off. We don't know.

Sarah M: Maybe we get into a broader question where we're all performing our lives for each other to some extent, right? At least if you're a creator on social media, which not everybody is. I'm not, but I sure do watch a lot of it. And short form video has these various poetic forms at this point, like the sonnet or the villanelle, where we all know what structure we're in and what we're seeing. It gives you a sense of place. 

For example, it is a convention that we all accept that if someone shows you what a day in their life is like, or get ready with me, it will open with a camera that is already set up and running, showing them pretending to wake up. We know that they didn't leave a camera running all night. We know they're pretending to wake up. But we all just agree to pretend that they really are waking up because it's a story. 

I don't assume people are taking all of this literally. I think a lot of people are very savvy about what they watch, and a lot of people are fooled by AI portraits of Jesus on Facebook. So it's hard to know where the mean is in all this. 

Sarah A: Who even knows anymore? I know. 

Sarah M: But I think the bigger question there is what expectations are we creating for ourselves, whether we know it or not, when we look at our lives and feel like the aesthetics of what we're doing are maybe more important than they are.

Sara A: Women are saddled with expectations and ideas, whether they're very traditional or very modern, or very feminist or very churchy, or what about what we should be doing because we're role models for whomever. And women are human, and human beings are very different from one another. So there are lots of people like you, like me, who love what we do, who are fortunate enough to have really compelling work. 

Sarah M: If you need a citation from within academia to support this radical claim, it is one of, I think, keystone claims of queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's people are different from each other. So the Academy knows, too. We have no excuse. 

Sara A: Yeah. There are people who want to live at work. There are people who hate work. There are people who wish they were in a different line of work, but all of us are different. And some of us are meant to be rocket scientists and lawyers and op ed columnists for the Times, and some are not. 

And sometimes I think it would not kill pundits to acknowledge that even those of us who are in this blanket category of women, have wildly different dreams and desires and hopes for our lives, right? 

Sarah M: Pundits and New York Times opinion columnists, on some level, must know that it's their job to make a tiny grain of sand into a giant gross pearl.

Sarah A: Week after week. 

Sarah M: Week after week, my God, the weeks never stop coming. But right that we want different things, and we want different things at different times. And when I think about my life, I really like getting to do the show. I feel like this is an ideal career for me. I love getting to sit here and talk about my thoughts and feelings. And that's ideal for me and I get to do it from home. It would be nice to be forced to be around other people more, but I'm working on that. But that's something that I only know because I have had the extreme grace and good luck and privilege to be able to build this work for myself. 

Sarah A: And most people can't.

Sarah M: No one would have given this to me. No one would have said, why don't you talk about your thoughts and feelings while sitting on your bed a couple times a week, and that'll be what you do. Nobody was asking for that. 

Sarah A: We needed it. But nobody would have asked. 

Sarah M: And so this idea that women need to do either what the workplace as it has always existed believes they are useful for or what men believe they are useful for. And I know that we all know, or most of us know, the real question is what do we know we're useful for? And what do we know about the way that we want to spend our lives, which amounts to how we spend our weeks and our days and our hours? And I think that the awareness deep down in our guts of what feels good to us is there. And getting stuck in a trend, it might be a way of getting closer, but it might also just be another distraction. 

Sara A: Yeah. 

Sarah M: We said we were going to get back to raw milk. 

Sara A: Oh, that's right. Yes. So have you seen, this is the other one that I wanted to ask you about. I forgot about this, but this is a channel called, Gubba Homestead. Have you seen this? 

Sarah M: No, I have somehow not yet seen Gubba Homestead in my 17 hours a day on TikTok. 

Sara A: So I stumbled upon this site, this feed, she's on Twitter, she's on Instagram and YouTube, and she'll do… is there a name for this meme where somebody says, “I'm a brunette. Of course, I use this kind of hairbrush. I'm a brunette. Of course, I use…”

Sarah M: Oh, yeah. What is that? I think of it as we're girls, because I think it started off as, “We're girls. Of course, we're gonna…”

Sarah A: Exactly. Yeah. It's one of those. So she does one of those except it's, “I'm a conspiracy theorist.” And she in total seriousness looks at the camera and says, “Of course, I believe that the sun doesn't cause cancer”, and then goes through all of these other claims.

Sarah M: Look, it's fair to say that the sun is not the only thing causing cancer, especially in a world with so many super fun sites. But trust me, it still gets the job done. When I was a kid, I thought everybody's dad was constantly getting melanomas cut off. 

Sara A: Well, a lot of them are. So then here's the thing, I cannot tell for the life of me whether this is satire or not. Because then you go on Twitter and she'll say, do you think this is satire? And I'm like, I don't know. 

Sarah M: Yeah. It's like, why don't you tell us? 

Sarah A: I know. Just tell us one way or the other. She's a flat earther. There are kind of RFK vibes almost. Everything's a scam or a conspiracy. Raw milk is better for you. Pasteurization is a scam. The food system is poisoning us, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so there are teeny tiny elements of aspects of these that are kind of true. Like the food system is not ideal, let's say. Agribusiness in the U.S., that's certainly fair. Pasteurization is good. Yeah. And the dairy thing is also, again, this kind of extreme iteration of opting out of consumer protections. Because like pasteurization, people died from tainted milk a lot. 

Sarah M: Yeah. Like Nixon's brother. And that's why he became such a flaming liberal. 

Sara A: That'll do it. Milk sterilization was a huge thing in the progressive era. This was life and death before antibiotics. So I don't know. I think that people are understandably frustrated by how things are, and people's faith in institutions is shaky, understandably so. And that at the extremes, you're getting the earth is flat, milk is a scam, birds aren't real, blah, blah, blah. 

Sarah M: We're going to cite Wikipedia in its article on Poe's Law. Poe's Law is an adage of internet culture which says that without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views. Which, easy. But I would also say, and I know many others have said this, that at this point, if you're making satire, that it is impossible to tell whether it's satire or not. Is it satire?

Sarah A: Yeah, I'm not sure that it is. 

Sarah M: Shouldn't there be some indicator? Because we're not mind readers. We need some kind of indication of authorial intent here. 

Sara A: And because the other thing is, she's obsessed with I think it's lard, like using lard as a skin emollient or something.

Sarah M: Yeah, something's going on with lard and the trad wives. I have not even gotten into it. 

Sara A: Something is going on with lard. So she's selling it, which makes me think that it's either she's serious about making money on it at a minimum. 

Sarah M: She's a lardpreneur. 

Sarah A: She's a lardpreneur. That's very 19th century.

Sarah M: I don't know if we've answered any of the pressing questions for America's homemaking types, but I feel like the concerns that I brought this topic to you with are basically, why are we so obsessed with hand making cereal at this point in time? And why has the trad wife risen? 

And I want to know if you think that this is correct. Because my analysis based on what we've been talking about is that the past few years, as you've talked about at the top of the show, in response to the girl boss and the realization correctly that is unfulfilling. I don't want to be a girl boss. We see now that this countervailing trend of the trad wife. And this, I would say to some extent, sincere and real and to some extent astroturfed conservative, at a certain point, propaganda showing it feels almost like a classic bait and switch where it's come be a trad wife and you can wear pretty dresses and you can build fires in your wood stove and make mozzarella for your adoring children and live like a mom in a picture book and live in this world that never was. 

And in reality, it feels like the more freedom you surrender, the more worldly freedom you surrender, I don't think that you get any back at home. I'm not going out on a limb here to say that having less freedom in the world, less access to money, less ability to be a wage earner, less ability to provide for yourself and your children. I can't see an argument where that is better for you in the long run. Or more specifically, I can't see an argument where it will work out on a large scale as a social movement for women to decide to just trust the man they married to take care of them the way they deserve. 

Sarah A: Or the men they elected. 

Sarah M: It has never worked in the past, it's not going to work now. Or them! I like them even less! 

Sara A: Yeah, because that has not gone great. I was reassured that law was settled, and it turns out that it was not. And I think, yeah, that the key thing is dropping out of public life. And I think that can look like a lot of things. I think if, let's say, you're a content creator and your content is you being a rural ballerina and making cheese and this, that, and the other, if you're making a ton of money, and you're savvy about that, and you are active in political action and all sorts of other things, then as an individual choice, I can see where that could work. But I think in general, selling people a fantasy…

Sarah M: But then it's the Schlafly thing. It's the Schlafly thing. It's a pyramid scheme. 

Sarah A: Exactly. 

Sarah M: Where it's you're selling It's like people what you have, but you only have it because you're selling it to other people. 

Sara A: And as you rightly point out, it never existed, right? It's like people are selling a version of 1900 where there's no TB, no cholera, right? We have antibiotics, we have the internet, we have all this other stuff. The actual life that you would have led or that your ancestors led a hundred years ago, 120 years ago, the privations and danger and medical horror of, all of that is sanitized. And it just basically looks as though you're living in this, almost shaker sort of modernist present day. 

Sarah M: We've made too many historical dramas showing people with all of their limbs. I think we shouldn't have done that. 

Sara A: Exactly. That was another lie about the past. The more you opt out of civic life, the less power you have. And even if you don't have money, if you're engaged in public discourse, if you're taking part in things, that's power and that you can't give that up. 

Sarah M: Yeah, I guess two questions. First of all, if the tradwives, as we know, and as we are discussing, are people performing tradwifedom on the internet, is the tradwife even a person who exists? Or is she always an illusion? Is she a vanishing horizon, as we like to say in academia? 

And then also, in terms of, the power of becoming an influencer and having brand deals and having money, of the forms of power available to normal people in America today, it's a pretty good one. I'm not going to tell anyone that it's bad for them because I think that's patronizing. 

But it also strikes me that what we've been talking about throughout this conversation and especially, whenever a Stepford Wives reference comes up is that some of the true riches that women have had historically and in the present and future. And I think some of our greatest resources are the community that we share with each other and the ways that we are able to help each other and to talk to each other and two I think through our friendships and through the people we know, we get a sense of how do we really feel. How do I feel? How do you feel? What do I need and I need to confess that my life may look great but like I'm not happy, or aesthetically everything's pleasing, but it hurts inside. 

Sara A: And if you're living on an island, metaphorically, where it's just the husband and kids and you're in the mountains, there's no public schools, there's no teachers, there's no town square, there's no community, essentially, it's exactly what Dolores Hayden was arguing, that the architecture and the lifestyle boxed women in so that they were alone with people who were depending on a certain kind of labor that they could perform. And I think if you're cut off from other parents at school, whatever it is, whatever that community looks like, you're more vulnerable and you have less power.

Sarah M: Yeah, I don't know what it's like to be a momtok influencer, but I imagine that if you wake up and you're like, oh my god, what imaginary toddler requests do I have to do a video about today? You are hustling. You are having to think about what kind of content to produce the people who make it seem easy, I think sometimes are working the hardest and you're dealing brand deals. You've made a full-time job for yourself. You have to keep expanding if you're in that mindset, which most Americans are. And you've also created a situation where it may seem like you have more access than most people to community, but actually, I think you're in kind of a water everywhere and not a drop to drink kind of a situation because-

Sarah A: You might have less, right.

Sarah M: Because you have to perform your identity every day outwardly and so the connections you make with people because what you do now is a performance that you have to do for your corporate allies or whoever you're working with, you know that it becomes impossible to express the authentic self that you need in order to connect with other people. And so the loss of community, whether it's because you're disappearing into the home or disappearing into the performance is one of the things that feels most dangerous. 

Sara A: Yeah, I agree. 

Sarah M: And I've said this before in this podcast or You Are Good, I can't keep track, but I live across the street from my best friend. And when I tell people that they get very misty, and I've known her since high school, and if I were to have this great love story and had this amazing spouse that I had married, then people would like that story too, where I'd be like, I live with my spouse, I love them so much. They'd be like, yeah, whatever, everyone does that, or like a lot of people are married, it's whatever, it's normal. But to live very close, a few steps away from someone who you have another kind of community with, I think, feels so abnormal in American life that's what gets people excited. 

Sarah A: It's an intentional community. Yeah. 

Sara M: It has contributed to my happiness more than any other individual thing I've done in my life in the past few years, and certainly more than anything I've bought. 

Sara A: For sure. You know what's interesting? I recently was researching a piece for AD about doomsday design, like sort of design for the end of the world.

Sarah M: Oh, God. 

Sarah A: Which has a very robust history, of course, in the Cold War. 

Sarah M: Yeah. The monsters are due on Maple Street. 

Sara A: The ritual of going to get a go bag or stockpile is the minute you leave the house and you're headed to Home Depot, you're on a very kind of individualistic mission to give yourself supplies and tools. So okay, you run out of food after a year, maybe, then what do you do? And essentially, the lesson of all of this is that the stuff is a red herring, you do need certain supplies if there's a total calamity, right? But what you really need are friends and neighbors and skills. Because if something really terrible happens and agriculture falls apart, you have to start somewhere, right? You need to know who knows how to do what in your community. You need to know who's a natural leader, who's good at planting. We're talking total apocalypse here, right? I was so inspired by that to think that it's not about buying a thing, it's about investing in these relationships.

Sarah M: Ah, I love that. Yeah. And then if you're burnt out by our modern existence and can't motivate yourself to get off the couch and stop watching the Comeback to go socialize with people. Remember, you will die if you don't make friends. 

Sara A: That is true. It's the end of the world as you know it if you don't have friends.

Sarah M: That's a little too scary. Yeah, but really, and thinking of the time that you spend with the people you love, or not even the people you love, because if we lived in a medieval village, we would not love everyone, but there would be somebody we tolerated because we got along well whenever we had to see each other.

Sarah A: The person with the good textiles.

Sarah M: Yeah, the person who makes beer, the person who knows how to shoe your horse. And we are in too big of a national and international community for the kind of go along to get along philosophy to make sense on the scale we're at. But in terms of the communities that we choose for ourselves, and that we build for ourselves, we have to think about what resources can we acquire that won't become valueless tomorrow, and that's…

Sara A: Yeah, absolutely. That's probably not like the latest greatest tile, it's probably not the latest greatest fridge. You can live happily with a fridge that's 10 years old. 

Sarah M: But you know what your fridge won't save you. 

Sarah A: That's true. Even if it wants to. It can't. 

Sarah M: Let us close by quoting Moira Donegan's piece in Book Forum. Moira writes, “Women still perform the majority of household chores, child care and elder care, the social maintenance that academics call kin keeping, i.e. remembering their mother in law's birthdays, scheduling and the management of conflicts, resources and outside help. Men today do slightly more of this than their fathers did. They do not do nearly as much as their wives do. Women's domestic labor is relied upon and enjoyed by everyone in their families, but always goes uncompensated and routinely goes unnoticed.”

Now, I know the reason that women do more of this work than men. There's many reasons, but I think part of it clearly, especially based on the conversation we're having, is this very pervasive historical idea that women's work, women's interests are lesser than men's not because of what they are but because women do them because of their adjacency to women. Because women are stupid and terrible and so is everything we do and for us to succeed at something a man does is insulting to him and for a man to have to do something we succeed at is also insulting to him. It's what I learned from growing up in the world as it's been to this point. 

And the point I would like to close on is that women don't do these things because they're the only jobs left to us because we're inferior, we do it because we're going to survive and because we're building the structures that are keeping everyone's lives going, not just right now, but in the future. And the apocalypse is not going to look like a road race through a desert. It's going to look like agriculture. So get your loom.

Sarah A: And small neighborhoods. Yep. 

Sarah M: Ah, thank you so much for being with us. I always just have the best time when you come on. 

Sarah A: Me too!

Sarah M: Oh, and people should see you in the Martha Stewart documentary.

Sarah A: Oh, that's right. Yes, I'm on TV. 

Sarah M: Where can people watch that? 

Sarah A: You can see it. I believe it's a CNN documentary. And I think you can find it now on YouTube. Hulu, and I think it might be on HBO Max for reasons I don't fully understand, but I gather that this is the case. Hard to keep track of all the things, but it was a super fun experience. And I wore eyeliner, which I never do and that was pretty fun. So tune in. 

Sarah M: Yeah, take comfort wherever you can. It doesn't matter what you enjoy for entertainment, as long as you remember that your life is enough as long as it makes you happy, no matter how it looks. And for the love of God, don't drink raw milk. 

Sarah A: Please don't drink raw milk. Please embrace pasteurization. 

Sara M: That was beautiful. 

And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Sarah Archer for being an amazing guest as always. We also have a link to a substack piece that Sarah wrote to go along with this episode. We hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much for editing help from Taj Easton. And thank you as always to Carolyn Kendrick for producing. That's our episode. We'll see you in two weeks.